In most growing cities, the beloved funk is too often replaced by the corporate fake. Talk to anyone in this town who’s still crying over the lack of Les Amis and Liberty Lunch, for instance, and they’ll tell you that it’s true, it’s so sadly fucking true, of Austin. But it ain’t all gray skies, citizen.

You’re no dummy, right? So you figure that pairing craft beer with Girl Scout cookies is, like, it’s gotta be some kind of a joke, right? Or at least just another wacky gambit for publicity? Yeah, well: Live and learn.

Thanks to Valentine’s Day, there’s always an overload of lovey-dovey shenanigans besmirching the general landscape each February 14th. So many bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolates and fancy dinners and public displays of affection … and then a spike in world population approximately nine months farther down the road.

So much to do in this town, yes, and your reporter never even considers the regular music scene. (Lucky for us all, the reporter who does consider the regular music scene? Who relentlessly considers it? Has just made note of some of the sonic goodness that we prefer beyond that regular scene.)

“Gotta be some mistake,” you think to yourself as you enter the brightly lit classroom upstairs at Central Market on North Lamar. “Gotta be some mistake,” you think, getting an eyeful of the big guy in chef’s whites behind the video-camera’d cooking line, “that can’t be Maffei. That’s gotta be, like, some linebacker escaped from a nearby gridiron.”

New year, new things. Some damned good things, actually. Check ‘em out, enjoy a little of what’s going on in this state capital:

Jeremy Bruch: Maybe best known in these parts as the drumming component of the Golden Arm Trio, the band that’s the epicenter of all things Graham Reynolds. Yeah, that’s the way to refer to a human being, right?
As a component?

Sure, go ahead, binge it up with your Netflix and your Hulu and so on. We’ll do that, too, every now and then. But we’ll also be enriching our life-of-the-mind with excellent graphic novels that – chacun à son goût – have nothing to do with costumed heroes and their cosmic shenanigans …

The Frank Mills, one of this city’s most acclaimed improv troupes, have been performing a weekly show at ColdTowne Theater since April of 2010. Hell, they’ve been doing their impressive and unscripted comedy thing on stages around town, anywhere and everywhere, since 2005. And all of that will end with this week’s show.